Introduction

This analysis focuses on Seattle’s Public Library (SPL) data set with all items checked out in 2022-2023. Data within a year provides a closer understanding of the trends and other topics of interest. With this in mind, I was curious to know what book subject was the most popular in 2022. Additionally, I wanted to be informed about what people in Seattle like to read in the most recent year. The summary below will showcase my findings to these curiosities.

Summary Information

Looking at the data set, in 2023, the month January was the only month recorded. Therefore, the analysis only focuses on the year 2022, where each month was recorded. With this filtered, the subject with the most checkout in 2022 was Fiction & Literature. This made sense to me because the subject Fiction is extremely popular and can have multiple targeted audiences. The total number of books checked out in that subject is 60,820. The book with the most checkouts from that value is The House of Broken Angels. Expanding on the numerical values of this data set, the average number of checkouts each month in 2022 is 5.30 books. Looking closer in the Fiction & Literature data set, I noticed that there weren’t any physical books that were checked out. Instead, each book was checked out either as an Audiobook or Ebook. The range between the Audiobook and Ebook is 11,900. This number surprised me because this means that there is a large range of preference between Audiobooks and Ebooks.

The Dataset

This data was collected and published by Seattle Public Library on January 31, 2017. There are many parameters in this data. For example, Usage Class, Checkout Type, Material Type, Checkout Year, Checkout Month, Checkouts in that month, Title of the book, ISBN code, Creator of the book, Subjects, Publisher, and the Publication Year. Seattle Public Library collects and generates the data digitally through each checkout and can trace back transaction way before 2017. They use the parameters as guidance to filter each data into the data frame. This data was collected to make this information more accessible to the public. It came from the Open Data initiative which demands city departments to make their data “open by preference” to promote transparency and civic problem solving. An ethical question we need to consider when working with this data are the type of books that are being checked out. For example, does the Seattle Public Library have a range of inclusive books and ones that empower the minority communities? Additionally, do these books get checked out as often as other popular mainstream books? This is important to question if the data set is representative to the community or have the resources for many to read about. A possible problem about this data set is that there are a lot of books that are the same but have different titles. Some include the creator’s name in the title and others have “(unabridged)”. This can be a possible problem when attempting to find the true value of the number of checkouts of a specific book due to the variation of title names.

Your Choice

When examining the data, I was curious to know which month had the lowest and highest number of checkouts in 2022 for Fiction & Literature. Therefore, a pie chart was decided to compare. A pie chart is extremely problematic since a human eye cannot fully comprehend and distinguish the angles of a pie chart. Therefore, a pie chart can conduct misleading information. However, this pie chart fits in this data because it is only comparing two categorical variable that are drastically different from one another. For that reason, a pie chart was conducted to evaluate the months with the most and least checkouts for Fiction & Literature.

Reviewing the pie chart, January had the most number of checkouts and April had the least. The difference between the number of checkouts between those two months is 33,798 checkouts.

source("Chart 3.R")

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